March 21, 2014

The Guardian’s latest gambit for readers is called “Generation Y Takeover” (or “generation Y takeover” because lower-case is much more on-message). This means they’ve brought in various Gen-Y “digital trainees” to contribute pieces like “Why I’m taking my Spotify list public” and “Which 90s film character are you?” (subhead: “which 90s film character do you most relate to?”) and “The songs that soundtrack Generation Y.”

So far I’ve learned that soundtrack is a verb, that talking about who we “relate to” is acceptable in a once-respectable newspaper, and that one of the key questions of the day is: “Am I the only one who feels as though I have to make a definitive choice between: a) sharing my unfiltered listening habits with my Facebook friends and “followers” on Spotify, and b) forever pretending that only my carefully curated public listens exist?”

Someone at the Guardian should warn the digital trainee in question that articles beginning “Am I the only one who feels as though … ?” read like a parody in Private Eye.

Of course, I’m so Gen-X that I remember when we talked about “choosing” rather than “curating,” and writing rather than “documenting.” Remember those times? (Recently I read an article in which parents talked about letting their children “curate” the posters/objects for said children’s own bedrooms.)

If I were to curate/document a selection of “Am I the only one who feels as though …?” concerns in my life, these would include:

1. Am I the only one who feels as though the words of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” should be amended to: “It’s once, twice, thrice you are out at the old ball game?”

2. Am I the only one who feels as though the supporters of U.S. sports teams known for their red uniforms (e.g. St Louis Cardinals) should adopt the British fan-chant “Come on ye reds”?

3. Am I the only one who feels as though the last word to the Champions League theme song sounds like “huzzah” (rather than “champions”)?

4. Am I the only one who feels as though a selfie should be taken by the person in question, i.e. a self-portrait, and not just a cute picture of yourself taken by friend/professional photographer that you decide to post on Twitter?

I see that this particular cluster of concerns are mainly sports-related. Am I the only one who feels as though this … etc?

And now I must go and get on with my olden-days job, i.e. writing a book.

February 19, 2014

I have just one week left of radiotherapy, after five weeks of being burned and zapped and prodded, and carrying around my green plastic shopping basket of clothes, and being asked to repeat my birth date and address, and being told to take a deep breath and relax into the table, every single day of the week. The only differences, day to day, occur when my treatment room, LA3, is running late, and they send me down to LA9, which is a bigger room and has a TV in its waiting area.

Every Tuesday, after my regular appointment, I have a meeting with a radiographer who asks me if I have any questions. I always say no, because everything is unfolding just as they predicted and described, in all its miserable banality. When something seems required other than nodding, I say that I feel tired all the time, and need to have naps every day. This, I’m told, is normal.

Of course, I do have questions. Why don’t any of the male patients have to wear the stripy gowns? Why are some patients in reception told they should “start drinking now”? Why do the radiographers always have such cold hands? Why is the TV outside LA9 always tuned to the Jeremy Kyle Show and not the Winter Olympics, like the one in reception? Why do people agree to go on the Jeremy Kyle Show, when they know he’ll make them look like fools? Are they lured by an all-expenses-paid trip to London? Would I go on the Jeremy Kyle Show if they offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to London – or Tokyo, say?

I don’t ask the radiographer any of these questions, though some days I’m tempted to ask the bus driver if it annoys him when someone dings the bell to request a stop, even though the bell has already been dinged.

At home, when I’m not groggy or trying to work on my book, TMiddy and I watch the Winter Olympics. Sometimes curling is on three channels at once, as though nothing else is happening that day. TM is disgruntled about the WO generally; they were better in the olden days, apparently, when Jean-Claude Killy was the star attraction. TM had a lab rat during his senior year of high school: he named it Jean-Claude Killy and created a Skinner box with a slope and a series of slalom gates.

TMiddy adopted a more positive attitude towards the Winter Olympics today when Finland knocked Russia out of the ice hockey. Overall, I’d say that I have more benign feelings towards the host nation, or maybe TM just lacks the Olympic spirit.

Last week I was going to post something about the low weeks in a writer's life - the rejection, the de-commission, the falling-through, the indefinite postponement, the samples and proposals and exploratory conversations that lead nowhere in particular (or nowhere particularly lucrative) - because that's the kind of week I had, with all of the above featured. But why be glum? And why destroy our carefully contrived image as modern-day Brownings (as in EB and R), enjoying some endless glamorous exile in a foreign land, delighting in our mutual artistic-ness and the range of fruit and veg in the local markets?

Our glamorous exile is in Sheffield here at the chilly heart of Austerity Britain, but there's a very good market just five minutes walk away, where I managed to spend sixty-two pence on Lincolnshire sausages yesterday, and where the market traders say things like "that's two pounds in money" (as opposed to olden-days weight), and "that'll be ten shillings!" At the market I've also learned the local word for rolls ("breadcakes"). Exile is educational.

January 23, 2014

This is a picture taken around 1893. It’s my great-great-grandmother, Rahui Te Kiri, with Ngapeka, the daughter of her first marriage, to Te Roa. My great-grandfather, Kiri Tenetahi Brown (Paraone) was a child of her second marriage, to Tenetahi.

In 1893 Rahui was probably in her 60s. She died in 1930, outliving Tenetahi and two of her sons, including my great-grandfather. I was looking at her will the other day and saw my grandmother’s name listed there, Hene Te Kiri Paraone. Grandma was in her late 20s when Rahui died, and already married to my grandfather. I wish I’d asked them more questions.

Rahui’s will is signed with her mark, a shaky X. It’s hard to see in the photograph above, but Rahui had a signature of a different kind, the moko (tattoo) on her face. The grooves in her skin were made with various plain and serrated chisels, either made of bone or metal.

My great-grandmother, Grace Tihoi Amos, didn’t have a moko; neither did my grandmother or any of her sisters. For them, its visual language no longer held the same currency. My grandmother, Jane (Hene), and her sisters Bella (Pera), Tottie (Rihi Paea), Roto (Rotorua) and Grace (Kerehi) attended school in Pakiri and learned how to write their names in English.

The only tattoo I saw I up close when I was a child belonged to my grandfather, Alf. He had a bird on his forearm: a sea bird, I think, blue and not very detailed. When I was small I liked to look at it and trace my fingers across it, but he was shy about it; maybe he didn’t want to give me any ideas.

I’m not keen on contemporary moko that turns what was a language, a precise series of signals about status and kinship and particular skills, into decorative gibberish. But then, I never thought I’d get a tattoo at all.

This month I got three tattoos – blue dots, made with a needle rather than a chisel. (“You’ll feel a sharp scratch,” the radiographer said, because this is now the medical euphemism for something piercing and painful.) These dots are there to guide the green lines beaming down onto what one of my friends calls the sun bed. It’s like Braille for a machine, I guess, a language of a different kind.

My three dots seem so pathetic compared with the marks on Rahui’s chin, something that implied great pride and great pain. She had a moko; I have an ellipsis. Every morning I go to Weston Park Hospital for the machine to read the dots, and to zap between the lines. (I’m using top medical terminology here; after all, I AM a doctor.) Unlike a moko, my dots can be hidden away; they’re a secret that thousands of us carry around, written on the body, along with a strange rectangle of tan. Though this must go on all over the world, it feels like a peculiarly British thing to me at the moment – the polite tattoo, discreet and easily hidden, whispering its coded language every morning on a hard table, in a cold room.

When the radiotherapy ends at the end of February, I get to keep the three dots. Hopefully, unlike Cheryl Cole, I won’t become addicted to the “sharp scratch” and decide to add a few dozen roses. I hope I’ll never come to think of tattoo as decoration. I hope that the three dots will be my only souvenir.

January 03, 2014

New year, new intentions. Or old intentions (get more work, do more work, earn more money) dressed up in optimistic spring shades, swishing their skirts. Plus some abandoned intentions from last year, of course. My short-story-a-day promise collided with my post-surgery indolence, and that was that. I managed to scrape to 236:

226: ‘Music in the Bone’ by Tomas Mac Siomoin227: ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ by Robert Coover (2013)228: ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’ by Georgina Hammick (1986)229: ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (2011)230: ‘Crazy in the Stir’ by Chester B. Himes (1934)231: ‘Before the Breakup’ by Balla (2005)232: ‘The End of the Party’ by Graham Greene (1929)233: ‘When the Glasses are Lost’ by Zrko Kujundziski (2011)234: ‘The Face’ by Dragan Radulovic (2007)235: ‘Sugar Cane’ by Derek Palacio (2013)236: ‘Last Summer in Marienbad’ by Kirill Kobrin (2011)

Not quite the 365 I intended, but 236 new stories isn't too bad.

Maybe that was the story of 2013 for me: not quite, but not too bad. We got to travel to Hamburg and Berlin and Rome again, to Monterrey for my nephew's wedding, and to Spain for Tom's birthday. I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, courtesy of a Carnegie Grant, to research Jean Rhys for a play I want to write. In May I went home to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and we spent Christmas in Tom's hometown of St Louis. I attended the Man Booker Prize in London. We visited friends there, and in Wales, York, and the Cotswolds; we met up with my English cousins in Newcastle, Sheffield, York. With Tom's mother we went back to Whitby and to the Lake District. The Devlin sisters stayed with us (without parents) for the first time. Other firsts: Rievaulx Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Haddon Hall, Bakewell, the top of the Shard. We spent our anniversary in Liverpool, one of our favourite places.

In 2013 we flirted with insolvency; I flirted with cancer; we both got very cosy with the NHS. I escaped the worst colleague ever and a job that pushed me to the edge. We made the happy move to a new job in Sheffield and a flat in an old cutlery factory alongside a noisy little river. In Glasgow I hosted a baby shower for my friend Doris; in Auckland I co-hosted a bridal shower for Martha, now married to my nephew. At the University of Sheffield, Tom took (and survived) a CELTA course in a long, hot July, and I studied Spanish this autumn. We saw more plays than movies. We watched almost all of BREAKING BAD. (The last few episodes have been saved as a new year's treat.)

Two new books published: a YA novel and my first children's book. Two stories commissioned, and a few poems published. A little manuscript fixing and ghostwriting. Too many false starts, conference calls and proposals that went nowhere in particular. Rejections and acceptances. Literary festivals, school visits, and talks via Skype. Interviews with Donna Tartt (phone) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in person). Self-doubt, despair, bursts of enthusiasm. Stories and schemes jostling in my head.

Two sparkling friends no longer here: Sarah Mohl and Sarah Doerries. It still feels implausible and wrong to write those words. They're ahead of me now, with my cousin (and godfather) Laly Haddon, and my mother's dear friend Cron Crosby, two towering men who didn't see out 2013.

This year I wasn't planning to make any new resolutions, but today a name swirled into mind: Graham Greene. I'd like to read more of his work, and I'd like to try my hand at writing every day, as he did - though I won't stop mid-sentence when I've reached 500, his usual goal.

Tom Moody and I ended 2013 by getting very dressed up in Mexico. We may not look so well-groomed in 2014, and I will almost certainly not be wearing false eyelashes again at any point. But we'll keep on being happy, and trying to make something of ourselves, in our own haphazard way.

December 16, 2013

TMiddy and I are jetsetters. You all know this. Sometimes I wish that this involved things like being invited to someone's villa in Ibiza, or onto someone's yacht anywhere, but it does not. Usually it means that I travel back and forth to Auckland, and TM travels back and forth to St Louis; sometimes, when other people are paying, we go to Germany. And that's about it. True, we were recently in Spain for another category of trip, known as The Holiday We Cannot Afford. But that was for TM's biggest-ever birthday, and absolutely brilliant and worth it in every way, not least because lots of other people came as well, and we got to laugh and eat and drink a lot, and play charades with categories like Tudor Women and Books By Hitler.

Today is a jetsetting day, by which I mean we woke up this morning in Sheffield and now, about seventeen hours later, we're in Dulles airport in Washington DC. We missed our connection to St Louis so we'll be here for some time.

Here are some things I observed along the way today. On the walk from our place to the train station in Sheffield, we saw a smashed wine bottle, a scattering of squashed chips and a shop coathanger (size 14), all strewn in close proximity. The coathanger was broken. A crime scene?

In Manchester airport, without any cash, we dusted off my United Club card and attempted to infiltrate every possible executive club in search of a free breakfast. This was unsuccessful until, after overhearing my plaintive call to the United helpdesk (confirming that we have no access to anything anywhere in the UK other than Heathrow), the desk guy at one club took pity on us and let us in. This was a lesson I learned living in the US. (Thanks, America!) Be polite but be persistent: you may wear someone down. The reward, in Manchester at least, will be free cereal and tea.

When we jetsetted off to Spain last month, we flew with Lufthansa and Swissair. On these airlines, the crew are polite, professional and friendly, and they speak several languages. Today we flew with United. The crew members dealing with those of us in the cheap seats did not smile. Not once. Actually, I was impressed at how resolutely unsmiling they could be for almost nine hours, thrusting polystyrene cup of teas at us, and barking "beef, chicken or vegetarian?" when serving our one meal. No free drinks, of course, or menus, or pleasantries. It could make sense if United were a budget airline, and politeness was one of the dispensed-with frills, but it isn't. This trip cost us a fortune. I'd rather deal with the bare-bones Ryanair: at least they're jolly.

Today's jetsetting highlight, though: a very clear view of Greenland. I've never seen it before. We were passing the southeast corner, I think, so all we could see was a great tumble of rocks, everything jagged and icy, various inlets dotted with trawlers. No towns or houses or rivers in view. I tried to take pictures with my phone, but the clouds and the ice and the frosty sea blurred into one on the screen - Greenland defying technology. A part of me hoped we would have to make some unscheduled stop there, and possibly spend the night.

Here at Dulles we had an hour to make the connection, and most of that was spent queuing in Immigration, or listening to desperate people shout and complain and beg in the security line. Still cash-free, we're spending the five hours until the next flight in the United lounge, watching football on TV, abusing the free house cabernet, and eating a tasty and nutritious free dinner: yoghurt-covered raisins, mini-carrots, greasy cheese squares in plastic wrapping, etc. I think I may have seen a commercial on TV for pizza made with cookie dough, but I may be hallucinating.

This is true jetsetting, FYI. The world of Sheffield - broken glass and coathangers, the pallid smear of cold chips - seems a universe away. By midnight we'll be in snowy St Louis, the home of toasted ravioli. If we're lucky, our bags will be there as well. In my carry-on I have three boxes of mince pies and all our American Christmas cards, and my mother's garnet ring, which I'll wear to my nephew's wedding in Mexico next week. In Tom's carry-on is a copy of The Economist, just pilfered from the United lounge. Please don't judge us because of our glamorous life.

November 03, 2013

Despite the short days, I usually look forward to November. November in the UK has good things (no Thanksgiving, a holiday I never
really enjoyed - no presents, pumpkin pie) and not-so-good things
(random fireworks going off at all hours, anti-Catholic bonfires). But Christmas is coming, bringing with it the chance to festoon everything in sight. It's still sort-of autumn here in the northern hemisphere. The long nights feel cosy rather than oppressive, the way they start to feel in, say, February.

Three of my family have birthdays this month: my father, who turns 80 on Friday; TMiddy, whose age cannot be listed for legal reasons (i.e. he will instigate a law suit); and my niece, Rebecca, who will be 23 at the end of the month. I think it's 23: I was living in Vauxhall and watching CLARISSA on TV the night my mother called with the news, so that sounds about right. Last week in my Spanish class I had to pose as a twenty-nine-year-old, as we were only doing numbers up to 30. My conversation partner (hola, me llamo Paula, tengo una hermana y un hermano, etc) told me I looked younger, but I think he doesn't understand numbers in Spanish yet.

This November there are some other good things happening: we're going to Barcelona at the end of the month to celebrate Tom's birthday. My sister and brother-in-law will be flying in from New Zealand on Tom's birthday itself, and then we're going to the coast for a week, to stay in a house owned by friends in a village by the sea. Lots of other friends are flying in - mostly from Britain, but some from Belgium and Switzerland, and maybe from Luxembourg - and we're having a party. The details of this party are still vague, but TM has declared it will have a 60s theme, and involve some games, including charades. TM alleges that he has only played charades once before in his entire life. How is this possible? His life is still very mysterious.

Despite the prospect of a fine time in Spain later in the month, I'm feeling quite low - still trying to wish our friend, Sarah Doerries, back into the world of the living, and recovering from two recent operations, with the prospect of radiotherapy and endless medication looming. These surgeries were nothing to do with my foot, which continues to look and feel strange, though it's slowly improving. Maybe soon I'll be able to wear high heels again. That will make me feel much better.

A lot of people have been in touch since Sarah's death. I think the news shocked a lot of us into being much more open about how much we all mean to each other. This reminds me of the maudlin song I liked when I was a little girl, Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World" - 'I see friends shaking hands, saying how-do-you-do/They're really saying: I love you.' I'm not someone who says 'I love you' very much, except to TM, who demands it. I guess I just hope that people know. It's why I send Christmas cards, even - especially - to people I haven't seen for years. They're really saying: I love you.

TM is pacing the floor, complaining that he's shocked every time he looks in the mirror because his hair has turned an unrecognizable colour. He claims that this colour is "tan-brown." Clearly his eyes are going, along with his mind. Perhaps if I tell him that I'm twenty-nine, he'll accept it without question, even if I say it in English. It's really hard to say in Spanish, in my opinion, because a v is a b, or something along those lines. Between that and all the lisping, I'm making slow progress. In Barcelona I'll be able to tell people that I'm twenty-nine and live in Sheffield; I'll be able to spell out my name, observe that I have los ojos marrones, and say "Me doy" if I'm asked a perplexing riddle or held in a wrestling grip. Unfortunately, everyone around us will be speaking Catalan; they'll probably pretend not to understand.

Some of you have asked about my evening at the Man Booker Prize, which was great but feels like a hundred years ago. I was there to tweet and blog for the Listener, and you can read my blog posts (in reverse order) here. My interview with Donna Tartt is in the print edition, hidden online behind the pay-wall, as is my review of Joanna Trollope's take on Sense and Sensibility. Another good thing about November: I have nothing to review, and I'm not teaching. I can read whatever I want.

October 23, 2013

I wrote the post 'Your story has touched my heart' on Saturday, when I
was groggy with painkillers after surgery, and groggy with crying as well, I
guess. So I keep thinking about things I should have included about Sarah.

Like the fact that most of her old friends
– her real friends, as we used to joke – called her Sally. Like the way she was
a really good mimic. (I used to ask her to do the Mississippi mechanic saying “I
want to see you” over and over again.) Like the way she was queen of the music
scene in New Orleans, and liked to rant about the way Jazz Fest was ruined, or because
U2 and Green Day were playing at halftime during the Super Bowl. She was queen
of grammar, and queen of etiquette, and loved to tell me, about someone
else and their behavior: “That’s just rude!”

She was an ardent supporter and promoter of
my books, buying them to give as presents (as her sister, Pat, just reminded
me!) and asking me to get copies of the novels published in NZ so she could
send them to people. She even published an excerpt from my second novel in the
Collegian, the Newcomb-Tulane magazine.

The time I ran out of gas on Willow Street
(because early on in NOLA we were broke and running the car on fumes), and after
a student, Jeff Colosino, helped push the car to the side of the road, I called
Sarah – who else? I knew she’d leave work right away to come and rescue me, and
that (of course) she’d have a can for petrol in the back of her car. I knew I
could call her anytime and say “be-yatch, get over here” and she would come.

Since I posted on Saturday, this blog has
had over 500 hits. Lots of people knew and loved Sarah. They want to read about
her and talk about her. They want her back as badly as we do. Of course, many,
many people knew her much better and for much longer than we did, and have lots
of stories. Please, if you feel like it, will you post them here in Comments for
other people to read? Or email them to me and I’ll post them? Not all of us are
friends on Facebook, or even on Facebook. Here’s something, in case you haven’t seen it, from the
Cincinnati Review.

I’ve heard from Eric Smith, who went to
high school with Sarah (who he called Sally) and travelled to Germany with her on an exchange program
post-graduation. He described her as “thoughtful,
interesting, crass, funny, witty and someone that brought a lot of things to
the table without taking anything off of it.”

Hopefully Doug Rowe won’t mind me sharing
this: "Cara and I saw her a few months
ago, early summer, I believe, when Jay's band was playing at d.b.a. on
Frenchmen Street. Sarah was so happy to see us, gave us big hugs and we talked
and laughed through the night. It's a cliche to say people were 'so full
of life', etc., after they're gone, but she truly was. Every time I'd run
into her out at a show at a local club, she'd always see me first, and come up
behind me and yell, 'Hey, you!' or something, then a hug."

Our friend Rebecca Lewis
wrote: ‘I remembered all those lunches we did, the
Christmas party, the last day you were in the house, with Sarah, me
and Rebecca [Crawford, Becky’s granddaughter]. Tom was trying to fill all
the tiny holes from the pictures you all had on the walls and Sarah was getting
impatient, telling you, you don't have to do this. I was thinking the same
thing, cause you could have been there forever.’

The lunches! I forgot about them. Becky and
Sarah and I did some of those cheap-in-August lunches at New Orleans
restaurants, the ones where you get a 25-cent lemon drop or martini in
Antoine’s or Commander’s. Our ladies’ lunches, we called them, where Becky and
Sarah could discuss their Fortier connection (Sarah’s father was there the same
time as Becky and her sisters), and everything that was right and wrong with
New Orleans and the world, or the world that was New Orleans. Meghan Freeman came to at least one of them as well. I can’t
remember things clearly anymore. (Too many 25-cent martinis?)

In her editorial for the Collegian in the fall of 05, Sarah – a
stalwart of the campaign to save Newcomb – wrote very
poignantly about the merger of Tulane and Newcomb Colleges, an end of an era in
the university’s history. “Loss is difficult,” she wrote. “Those of us in New
Orleans are especially aware of that fact right now. Yet the majority of us has
also learned that we can get over most any loss, that we are more than the sum
of our things, no matter what sentiments may be attached to them.” Later in the editorial she talked about
“the New Orleans idiom, which we inherited from West Africa, in which we’ve ‘been
knowing’ someone for X amount of time. The present perfect there implies a relationship
that stretches beyond time – Einstein’s fourth dimension – it suggests
intimacy, ken, the kind of warmth and openness toward others that has
contributed to New Orleans’s special culture.”

Sarah was a writer; I don’t know that I emphasized this enough last time
I wrote. She taught creative writing with me and Peter Cooley and Dale Edmonds
at Tulane.

Dale wrote to me: ‘When I think of Sarah, I smile, and my brain says something like, "She's
one of the good ones." We were always on the best of terms, and she
was so helpful to me over the years in our many dealings. And what lovely
times we had at your parties taking the inventory of everybody and everything .
. . guilty pleasures? Probably, but pleasures nonetheless. And her
little sly smile that connected with so many things that matter, that really
matter. And the way even a brief conversation with her made you think
that, yes, there may be hope for us after all, and let's have another drink on
that ….’

October 20, 2013

This week our dear friend Sarah Doerries was
in Strasbourg, visiting friends there. She was in Europe for a work trip to the
Frankfurt Book Fair, representing the Historic New Orleans Collection: she’s
Senior Editor in their Books Division. On Facebook, she posted about discovering
that her family’s ancestors – the Bertel side of the family – came from the
Lorraine part of Alsace-Lorraine.

Some time this week – maybe Wednesday, I
think – she collapsed with a brain aneurysm, and on Friday she died. We got a
call from her good friend Henry Griffin late on Thursday night, and I’ll always
be grateful to him for this, so we didn’t have to find out on Facebook.

This morning we spoke to her husband, Jay.
Jay is in Strasbourg, trying to deal with everything – emotional and practical.
He was calling to tell us that Sarah loved us.

We loved Sarah. When we moved to New Orleans
in 2004, she was our first local friend (outside our adopted family there, the
Manikin clan). For that first year I was just an adjunct instructor at Tulane,
a temp who only met most colleagues at the photocopy machine. Then I met Sarah
at a poetry reading she’d helped Peter Cooley to organize at Cudd Hall. She was
carrying in cold drinks and plastic trays of sandwiches, chastising anyone who
reached for a bag of chips before the reading began. She was blonde and
attractive, wearing a pencil skirt and nice shoes. Peter introduced us, and I
got the feeling that Sarah sized me up immediately and decided I was OK.

Through Sarah, we were initiated into New
Orleans – Krewe de Vieux, Langenstein’s, Delachaise – and met lots of people. We
lived around the corner from each other, us on Cucullu and Sarah on Joseph. She
came over a lot to watch THE AMAZING RACE, our favorite TV show. Often she’d bring her own drink in a
go-cup, because we were drinking wine and she wanted something else. We talked
a lot about entering as a team, and discussed how we’d be labeled. Gal Pals, we
decided, and – after the storm – Gal Pals/Katrina Survivors. Tom told us we’d
be a hopeless team, and that we’d need to spend at least two years building up
our upper-body strength before applying. Also, I told Sarah that she would
almost certainly make me do all the hard challenges, while she stood around
smoking. Even after she gave up smoking, Sarah conceded that she would still
make me do all the hard challenges.

Some Sundays we went out on her boat on Lake
Pontchartrain, drinking beer and eating cheese and crackers, watching the sun
set and the brown pelicans swoop, listening to the waves and the wind. When my
parents visited early in 2005, my father came out with us one early evening: he
loves sailing, and sat there giving Tom precise instructions on steering. That
was the thing that upset my father most, I think, after the storm, when I told
him that Sarah’s boat had smashed up and sunk.

Once I asked
her how far we could sail in her boat. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough to
sail to Mexico, she said. We’d pack in supplies, and then make our way from the
brackish lake to the sludgy waves of the Gulf coast, sailing until we reached
clear water. Sarah had spent a lot of time in Mexico; she had a blue string
hammock from the Yucatan hanging among the plants of her front porch. We should
all buy houses with courtyards in Merida, she said.

We did lots of drinking and eating –
celebration dinners after I got the permanent job at Tulane, gave a reading,
published a book. Drinks at the Columns, or at Cure on Freret Street. Happy
hour in the Quarter, in the bar at Antoine’s, with Russell Desmond. Dinners
paid for by Tulane with visiting speakers like Lawrence Wright. Dinners at our
house with whatever was in the fridge. Practically everywhere I can think of in
New Orleans, every bar and restaurant where we went, we went with Sarah.

Sarah’s house of treasures: old pictures, vintage
glasses, decanters, silver. The most
ancient TV (which is why we made her come around to our house). Pieces of Mardi
Gras costumes. The “Better Cheddar” from Langenstein’s. Books. She would only
work on her poems if she was completely alone in the house; otherwise, she
said, she felt too self-conscious. I told her that was ridiculous, but she just
shrugged. I really liked the poem she wrote about not wearing a bra.

On the day before Katrina hit, when the
mandatory evacuation was declared, we spent the morning packing the car and
carrying things up the stairs. Sarah was crazed that morning, in and out of our
house to hurry us along. She said she was lighting candles to St Jude, the
patron saint of lost causes. We were car-pooling with her, because she insisted:
she was going to Alexandria and we were going to Marksville. When I told her
that Margaret Orr, the meteorologist on WDSU, was crying on TV, Sarah said:
“That bitch!” (Afterwards, we said that every time we saw Margaret Orr on the
evening news.)

How long did we drive that day? Maybe
fourteen hours, for a trip that normally takes about three, plus time to get
lost in Alexandria in the middle of the night. Sarah made us go through
Mississippi – for no good reason – and that was where her car broke down. So
she and her friend, Joe, ended up in our car. We ate fast food and told a lot
of stories. Later, she had trouble getting her car back from the mechanic in
Mississippi. He wanted her to agree to go out with him.

Christmas Eve that year, back in New Orleans at last, our gas went out, so
we had no hot water and couldn’t cook. On Christmas Day a Salvation Army truck
drove by and asked us if we wanted a free Christmas dinner. We walked around
the corner to Sarah’s to take a shower, wearing our bathrobes and flip-flops.

Not long before
the storm, Sarah had found – in the drawer of a sewing table on sale at an
antiques auction – a stack of old engraved cards. Each card read: YOUR STORY
HAS TOUCHED MY HEART. NEVER BEFORE HAVE I MET ANYONE WITH MORE TROUBLES THAN
YOU. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS TOKEN OF MY SINCEREST SYMPATHY. After Katrina, when
everyone wanted to tell their story about evacuation and the flood and their
messed-up lives, Sarah said she never realized these cards would be so useful.

After the
storm, Sarah hired Tom to work with her and Trina Beck at Tulane, in the Office
of Co-curricular Programs. Together they organized talks and prize-givings and
readings, and she teased him about his mandals. They organized pig roasts, and
Friday donuts. Sarah drove us home from work in her car, even though we could
all have really walked. (She told us that every Mardi Gras she walked at least
thirty miles with Julu, and nothing logical that Tom could say would persuade
her otherwise.) Sometimes she and I would hang out on the swing-seat on the
Cudd Hall porch so she could smoke and we could gossip. Once, when Julie
Orringer was visiting as the Zale writer, the three of us came upon a bouncy
castle set up by some student group, and we took off our shoes and bounced
until we were breathless.

Even when
she left Tulane and went to work downtown, all that meant was that we went out
for drinks together more often. She came to all our monthly salons (first
Friday of the month), complained if I invited people she didn’t like, and ate
dinner with us afterwards at Taqueria Corona. I made her come early to all our
Christmas parties, and stay late. Many of our friends – Becky Lewis, Doug Rowe,
Joy and Paul Cronvich, Meghan Freeman and Dwight Codr, Rodney and Paige
Rabalais – met her and grew to love her as well. Dwight sent me an email today,
remembering lots of times “talking and laughing” with Sarah; he described her
as “a gift to us during our time in New Orleans.” That’s how I think of our
friendship as well: a gift.

This is a
picture taken in July 2011, on a trip back to New Orleans – Sarah, me and
Rodney Rabalais eating Mexican food in the Quarter.

She and Jay
moved to a house of their own on Peniston Street, which meant when we visited
them we could walk to the Columns. (For a while they were thinking of moving to
the North Shore, but Joy Cronvich talked Sarah out of it at one of our
Christmas parties: she said when people moved to the North Shore, no one ever
saw them again because it took too long to drive across the lake.)

When we left
New Orleans in August of 2010, Sarah and Jay threw our leaving party at their
new house. We missed their wedding because we were away somewhere – we were
always away – and never got them a wedding present, because we were always
looking for the perfect thing. In Rome we saw some china with a coral motif,
and were nearly persuaded, but recently we thought of something better: an
AMAZING RACE sign painted by Simon on Napoleon Street. It would read: “Sarah and
Jay, you are Team Number One."

After Tom
and I moved to the UK, Sarah and I would email a lot – short, brisk emails with
quick comments or demands. Sarah would email to say: Jay just asked me to tell you to please
get a job working on THE HOBBIT. I’d email
with research questions for my books – If there was a fictional boutique in the Quarter
selling vintage clothes, where would it be? She’d need someone’s phone number –
Can I ha' dat? When I was up against a book
deadline, she would send me encouragement: TYPE FASTER. When someone published
a self-serving piece about New Orleans in the New Yorker, the subject line in Sarah’s email read: a-hole.

I last saw
Sarah in March 2012, when we stayed with her and Jay in the shuttered house on
Peniston Street. We met up in Antoine’s bar to drink with Russell. We ate
Vietnamese food. She photocopied a whole slew of New York Times Sunday crosswords for me to take home, and made me
lie on the ground with my feet up the wall to help my flight-achy legs. Sarah
was always making me do things. She always knew the places to go. People I met
always seemed to know her already.

She said they
couldn’t come to Spain this November because of Jay’s exams, but she promised
they’d visit us next year. She asked me to come over to Frankfurt to meet her
there last weekend, but I was busy with work and other stupid things. Couldn’t
I have gone? Just two hours on a plane: that’s how close we were last weekend. After
Jay rang this morning, I sat up in bed and said, aloud: “I want Sarah back.”
But it’s too late, too late to light any candles to St Jude.

In the last
email I got from Sarah, she told me she was recording the new series of THE
AMAZING RACE to send to us in the UK, where it is (inexplicably) not broadcast.
If Sarah and I had ever gone on the show, billed as Gal Pals/ Katrina Survivors
– or maybe Gal Pals/Authors – Sarah would have charmed and bossed and talked her
way around the world. She would have made me do all the hard challenges. We
would definitely have won.

October 06, 2013

TMiddy usually knows things - for example, what time the football is starting, or that there's no such word as "refrigidation." I know I can always ask him, say, what day of the week is it? and he'll have a definitive answer.

But very occasionally he is uncertain. When we received the invitation for my nephew's upcoming wedding in Monterrey, Mexico, we were both a little confused. Firstly, it's in Spanish, and I'm not starting Spanish classes until next week. (All I can manage right now is an order for patatas bravas, and an impersonation of my Puerto Rican doctor back in New York.)

Secondly, it uses the word FORMAL. Formal in New Zealand and formal everywhere else - except southern California, maybe - is quite different. Formal in New Zealand means you've remembered to put on some shoes, though you may not be planning to keep them on for long.

Formal at a wedding in Monterrey, we understand, means black tie and ball gowns. It means red-carpet wear. This should be no problem for TMiddy, as he has a smart Armani tux from back in the olden days, before the Internet was invented, when he was known as Tom Moody and went to the Oscars. (He ran the marketing campaign for A ROOM WITH A VIEW.)

But still, TM was unsure. We are Godparents of the Rings at this wedding, and have to stand up during the church service to be seen by all. Important, he said, to make a sartorial splash.

His first thought was this: although he's from El Norte, maybe TM should take the opportunity to represent/promote New Zealand?

Or maybe not. Then he thought: Monterrey isn't that far from New Orleans, and might be warm in December. Maybe roll out some Jazz Fest gear?

I vetoed this. One day, all of TM's Jazz Fest T-shirts will meet with some terrible accident e.g. burning. It will be a sad day for tie-dye.

At the very least, I suggested, he should wear his tux jacket.

Though maybe not with the yellow Beatles T-shirt, even if it does have my birthday printed on it.

Seeing that T-shirt reminded us of the lovely yellow bow that my sister hid in my luggage this May. She'd been trying to fob it off as a "prize" at Martha's bridal shower, and I'd told her it was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Imagine my surprise when I unpacked back in the UK, and found it stuffed into one of my boots.

TM has taken quite a shine to this yellow bow, arguing that it can make any outfit dressy, even if the weather is warm.

And if the weather is cold, all he needs to do is throw on some jeans, a pair of slippers, and my velvet evening coat:

See? Instantly formal.

I don't know. He may just have to settle for a tux, white shirt, black tie, cufflinks ensemble. He doesn't want anyone to be distracted from his planned Godfather of the Rings dance, the choreography for which remains top-secret.

Don't forget to check in over at Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends, and to read my Tweets from the Man Booker Prize ceremony on October 15th - I'll be tweeting that night as @nzlistener. I've just found out that my alter ego, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, will be there as well. The two of us in the same room? Watch that space.